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Food
for
Holiday
Thought: Eat Less, Live to 140?
By
David Hochman, the
New York
Times
November 23, 2003
As
a follower of the calorie restriction, or C.R., regimen — whose
longevity claims are unproven for humans — Kim Sandstrom eats very
little
In his quest to reach the age of 143, Michael A. Sherman is making his
peace with doughnuts. Renouncing potato skins and chocolate-chip pancakes
was no problem, but he just hasn't found a substitute for a glazed,
oven-warm bear claw oozing with apple filling. "I love them, but the
larger specimens of that species can approach 1,000 calories," he
said a few weeks before Thanksgiving, a holiday he can't get overly
excited about. "That's almost as much as I allow myself in a whole
day."
To say Mr. Sherman is on a diet is to say
NASA's Voyager spacecraft, still twinkling at the far edge of our solar
system, is on a Sunday drive. Six years ago, Mr. Sherman put himself on
the most brutal calorie-reduction plan imaginable. Not that he was
especially overweight at 5-foot-5 and 145 pounds. But by switching from
pizza and chips to flaxseed, brewer's yeast and sprouts, he whittled his
daily caloric intake to less than 1,600, and dropped his weight
precipitously, dumbfounding his friends and family.
"Here was a one-time competitive
power-lifter who looked to me like a concentration camp refugee,"
said his wife, Kathy, who almost divorced him because of it. In those
first two years, Mr. Sherman's libido disappeared, he was cranky, cold and
flatulent all the time, and people suspected he had cancer or AIDS.
"Michael's skin hung off his body like you see on old men," she
said.
Paradoxically, old age was exactly what Mr.
Sherman was shooting for. After reading that drastic calorie restriction
slows the aging process in laboratory animals, he vowed to starve himself
to stretch out his golden years into the 22nd century. If mice, geese and
guppies could extend their life span 40 to 50 percent by eating 40 percent
less than they wanted, why couldn't he?
"I'm definitely not one of these guys
who says, `Ooo, 18 more years and I can retire,' " said Mr. Sherman,
46, who runs a biotech company in
California
near his
Silicon Valley
home. Now that he's acclimated to the diet and is somewhat bulked up from
weight lifting, he looks more like a cyclist than a "Survivor"
finalist. "I feel very much like I did at 20," he said.
"Nothing but blue sky ahead of me." Mr. Sherman is part of a
curious subculture of scientists, philosophers, futurists and assorted
high-minded anorectics who believe that saying no to dessert (and
sometimes to breakfast, lunch and dinner, too) will be the ticket to
superlongevity.
Advocates of the strategy, known as calorie
restriction, or C.R., insist they're not dieting to get skinny but rather
to have the last laugh. Eat smart enough, they say, and you can live to
see great-great-grandchildren, not to mention postpone the onset of
cancer, diabetes, heart disease and kidney failure.
"Aging is a horror and it's got to stop
right now," said Michael Rae, a vitamin researcher from
Calgary
,
Alberta
, and a board member of the Calorie Restriction Society, which has about
900 ultralean members worldwide. "People are popping antioxidants,
getting face lifts and injecting Botox, but none of that's working,"
he said. "At this moment, C.R. is the only tool we have to stay
younger longer." It's worth mentioning that Mr. Rae is 6 feet tall,
weighs just 115 pounds and is often very hungry.
In a society obsessed with dieting, in which
fads increasingly have the power to reshape the eating habits of millions
— the Atkins diet, the
South
Beach
diet — the C.R. lifestyle, with its abstinence ethos, will probably
never win mass appeal. But the extremism of the diet does seem to fit the
present mood, so much so that last month, the President's Council on
Bioethics released a report specifically mentioning calorie restriction,
and warning, "The pursuit of an ageless body may prove finally to be
a distraction and a deformation."
Researchers have known about the
Methuselahan powers of eating less since the 1930's, when a
Cornell
University
nutrition professor unexpectedly discovered that dieting rats tend to live
30 percent longer. Similar reactions have since been found with fruit
flies, monkeys and
Labrador
retrievers, but the impact of calorie reduction on humans has been mostly
speculative.
During the first and second World Wars, the
shortage of food in some northern European countries led to a sharp
decrease in mortality from coronary artery disease, Type 2 diabetes and
cancer, according to Dr. Luigi Fontana, a geriatrics researcher at
Washington University in St. Louis. Those rates surged again after the
wars, he said. Likewise, on the Japanese
island
of
Okinawa
, where residents have traditionally followed a diet similar to that of
C.R., an unusually high number of people have lived a century or more.
Now, the
United States
government is investing $20 million to see if the regimen really works for
people, just as other researchers struggle to decipher how calorie
restriction works at the cellular level. Some suspect eating less slows
the rate of cell division in tissues. Others theorize that hunger triggers
a survival mode, activating genes that help resist stress and protect
vital organs. Meanwhile, biogerontologists are racing to invent drugs that
mimic the effects of calorie restriction without all the carrots and
cottage cheese.
"It's a crucial moment for calorie
restriction," said Dr. Mark P. Mattson, who heads the Laboratory of
Neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on
Aging in
Baltimore
. "We're at a stage where increasing people's average life span isn't
just a fiction."
In January, Dr. Mattson, who's been skipping
breakfast himself for 20 years and is a delicate 5-foot-9 and 120 pounds,
will begin the first major study on the long-term effects of meal skipping
on humans. Men and women between the ages of 40 and 50 will be screened to
see how blood pressure, cholesterol, immune function and other markers
respond to one daily meal versus three. Another institute study already
underway at three university research centers (Washington University,
Tufts and Louisiana State) is looking at whether lighter meals reduce the
risks of age-related chronic diseases — like heart disease and
Alzheimer's — and lead to longer and more productive lives.
Mr. Sherman isn't waiting for the clinical
trials. He's up most mornings by 7, microwaving his "megamuffins,"
low-calorie treats that took him more than a year to engineer from such
delicacies as raw wheat germ, rice bran and psyillium husk, the active
ingredient in Metamucil (the 27-ingredient recipe is hugely popular on the
C.R. Web site, www.calorierestriction.org). Lunch might be a protein bar
or a roast beef "sandwich" without the bread. For dinner, when
Kathy Sherman and their children sit down for tacos or spaghetti, he'll
sometimes have "fast fish and veggies," a 300-calorie helping of
broccoli, zucchini and canned pink salmon — "the perfect
food," he calls it. If he's extra hungry, he'll drink a quart of
green tea, chew sugar-free gum or add a little more whey protein topping
to his end-of-the-day fruit salad.
He's miserable, right? "Actually, it's
bliss," Mr. Sherman insisted over a hot megamuffin, which had the
consistency and culinary allure of roofing insulation. "I don't
expect for one second that many people could follow this diet, but for
those of us who can, food like this actually tastes good. Especially when
you consider it could buy you a few extra decades."
By almost anyone's standards, Dr. Roy L.
Walford is an old man. At 79, he is confined to an electric wheelchair and
his voice is so weak, he speaks into a microphone wired to a small
tabletop amplifier. A professor emeritus of pathology at the
University
of
California
at
Los Angeles
and the person most responsible for pioneering the C.R. lifestyle, Dr.
Walford, whose books include "Maximum Life Span" and
"Beyond the 120 Year Diet," is dying from the fatal nerve
disorder known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
"It's a big drag," he said slowly
in an interview at his one-story red brick industrial loft in
Venice
,
Calif.
"If they don't find a cure, I definitely won't reach 120. Maybe not
even 90."
As chief of medical operations for Biosphere
2, the eccentric 1990's experiment in living within a self-contained
ecosystem, Dr. Walford and seven researchers involuntarily practiced
calorie restriction for about two years after food grew scarce inside
their desert bubble. He now blames the oxygen-depleted air for his
illness. But the experience also yielded promising findings about
low-calorie, high-nutrient diets. The emaciated crew members had lowered
blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol and triglyceride levels. It
wasn't long before Omni magazine types everywhere were slashing calories.
In 1994, the Calorie Restriction Society was formed.
"Initially, it was trying," said
Dr. Dean Pomerleau, 39, a robotics engineer from suburban Pittsburgh with
two children under 10, who started calorie restriction in 2000 after
seeing a Nova documentary on Dr. Walford. "But you get used to
it." Still, his dining rituals are eccentric even by C.R. standards.
Dr. Pomerleau, who is 5-foot-8 and 117 pounds, eats the exact same meal
— it's the salad to end all salads — twice a day, 365 days a year, but
he said he has never been healthier or more focused mentally. "For
every calorie you save, there's about a 30-second increase in your life
span," he said. "It's worth more to me to have an extra two to
three minutes of life than an extra slice of pizza."
There's no shortage of skepticism about
calorie restriction in the scientific community. An article in this
month's issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the leading
journal on obesity research, concluded that caloric intake was not as
important in staving off death by cardiovascular disease as other factors,
like physical activity.
"A focus on calories alone doesn't
strike me as the way to live a long life," said Dr. Michael Alderman,
a professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who
contributed to the article, which examined the results of a 21-year study
of nearly 10,000 subjects. The healthiest people in the survey exercised
regularly, which requires eating more, Dr. Alderman said. "If you're
burning fuel, you've got to feed the engine with more food."
Thomas Wadden, director of the Weight and
Eating Disorders Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine, warned that extreme dieting like an ultralow-calorie regimen can
lead to mental health problems.
"There's no question that people who
fixate on food this much can develop mild obsessive-compulsive
disorder," he said. "This behavior can also precipitate an
eating disorder. When subjects lose 15 to 20 percent of their body weight,
they sometimes start binge eating after restricting calories for a period.
Others can become clinically depressed."
"Some people might like this diet, but
most people won't last half a day on it," he said.
Kim Sandstrom, 47, a mother of six from
Hillsboro
,
Ore.
, has reached her eight-month anniversary. Earlier this year, she said,
she weighed 215 pounds and had been bedridden for months with
complications from lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
In March, she switched to a supernutritious,
1,200-calorie-a-day diet and dropped 75 pounds. She stopped all her
medications and is currently preparing to perform a stage version of
"Shirley Valentine." "I'm freed up from food," she
said. "This spring, I'm entering the Mrs. Oregon pageant."
The real showstopper, though, might be a
pill that would mimic the effect, at the cellular level, of an ultralow-calorie
diet. Last summer, Dr. David A. Sinclair, an assistant professor at
Harvard
Medical
School
, discovered that a chemical commonly found in red wine could vastly
increase life span. Okay, so the chemical, resveratrol, only worked with
yeast and fruit flies in his experiments, but Dr. Sinclair, 34, is an
optimist. "It could be a revolution in medicine," he said, if it
were made into a pill. "If we're able to switch on the body's own
defenses the way calorie restriction seems to, we could be talking about
an end to cancer, stroke, heart attack and all the other age-associated
diseases."
Alas, simply drinking red wine by the glass
doesn't produce the full laboratory effect of resveratrol. A true drug to
mimic the substance would require years of tinkering and
government-approved testing. In the meantime, a northern
California
company called Future Foods is selling a resveratrol dietary supplement,
which Dr. Sinclair recently started taking. "I tried calorie
restriction, but it made me too miserable," he said. "There's a
running joke with C.R. Yes, you can live longer, but after a few weeks of
it, you won't want to."
Mr. Sherman, the
Silicon Valley
entrepreneur, and his not-always-amused wife have weathered many ups and
downs because of his six-year adherence to the diet. A few years ago, when
the stresses nearly broke up their marriage, the
Shermans
sought couple's counseling and they hired a housekeeper to whip up all
those time-consuming megamuffins.
Mr. Sherman now maintains a separate
refrigerator in the family garage, where he keeps neat rows of Tupperware
stocked with odd ingredients like soy protein, sucralose and guar gum. To
get his libido back and improve his mood, he takes low doses of a
prescription drug, used mainly by Parkinson's patients, called Deprenyl.
He has also put on a little weight. Mr.
Sherman is even getting comfortable with doughnuts again. "Every
Sunday, I go get Krispy Kremes for the family," he said. "I
still don't eat them, but I get this perverse pleasure from buying them.
My son loves the regular glazed and Kathy likes the maple ones."
Doesn't Mrs. Sherman worry that all those
extra calories will take precious hours off her life?
"Are you kidding?" she said.
"I don't believe in that."
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